Boycotts and Antisemitism

A few weeks ago, the McGill Law Students’ Association (LSA) held a referendum to amend its constitution. Among the elements of the changed constitution were clauses which embedded the Association’s opposition to McGill’s having academic relations with institutions in Israel; i.e. it embedded a pro-boycott position. This made a certain segment of McGill’s donor class lose its mind, and it also prompted its President, Deep Saini, to send the alumni an email calling the motion “antisemitic” (in effect if not in intent) and threatening to yank the university’s Memorandum of Understanding with the LSA, which would mean depriving it of money, space, and the right to distribute publications on campus.

This is an overreaction. There are better ways forward for all concerned. 

Before we get started on this, let’s make something very clear: antisemitism, some of it quite vicious, definitely exists in Canada. In recent months, synagogues in Toronto and Montreal have been shot at on a regular basis, which is an absolute outrage. At McGill specifically, there have been some quite blatant incidents of antisemitic graffiti.  Worse, there are those out there who insist on dismissing all of these as “false flag” affairs (you know, by those “tricky” Jews). They aren’t. There is a tremendous amount of hate out there, and Canadian Jews are by no means wrong to call it all out for what it is. No one should minimize this.

That said, there is a huge cottage industry that tries to expand the notion of antisemitism to include any criticism of or opposition to the policies of the State of Israel. The efficacy of that argument may have taken a hit since Trump came back into office, and it became abundantly clear that some claims of antisemitism are simply not levelled in good faith (Columbia, anyone?), but there are still a lot of people who cling to this position. In Canada, I think we’ll start to see less of this weak line of argument (or at least I hope so) now that one of our federal party leaders, Avi Lewis, is both Jewish and a fierce critic of Israel.   

With respect to the boycott movement itself, let’s be clear: it makes no distinction between Israeli universities and the State of Israel. I would urge everyone to re-read my March 2025 interview with Maya Wind, an Israeli academic and author of Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, a book dedicated to enumerating Israeli universities’ various misdeeds. The kinds of things that she surfaces are for the most part the kinds of things any university in any country would do: that is, interface with the government, work with the armed forces, and generally be helpful to the state. There is, as Wind states, no possible way that an individual Israeli university could avoid being the target of sanctions because they are Israel, which is the target  because of its policies of legal discrimination against Israeli Arabs and of dispossession of Palestinian lands in the occupied territories (I’ll leave out Gaza/Lebanon for a second because the boycott movement predates 2023, but I’ll come back to them in a bit). 

Since the purpose of the boycott is to punish the Israeli state for its policies, it’s probably fair to ask “why Israel and not other countries with similar records”? Isn’t this double-standard, the singling-out of Israel, potential evidence of antisemitism? Perhaps. This was, frankly, a much stronger argument before the Gaza War when Israel dialed the whole killing civilians thing up to new and unprecedented levels. There simply aren’t that many countries out there with “similar records” anymore. Again, for argument’s sake though, let’s pretend it’s September 2023 and ask the question: is this a double-standard? Is (was) Israel really a worse regime than say, China/Iran/Russia/Ethiopia, etc.? And if so, why aren’t we boycotting them?

(To be clear, I don’t think this is a case of legal discrimination, as the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs claimed in a failed-but-under-appeal lawsuit against the University of Windsor for its no-new-Israel-partnerships stance. But it is conceivably a morally inconsistent position.)

Let me direct your attention back to the interview with Dr. Wind, because her answer to that question is revealing. Her take is that the boycott movement is not hypocritical because it is not based on a relative judgement. She seemed perfectly happy to accept that there were many potential targets of academic boycotts with records similar to Israel (including Canada, with its treatment of Indigenous peoples). But the difference for her was about allyship: Palestinians has asked for a boycott of Israeli institutions in a way that, say, Indigenous peoples in Canada, or Uyghurs in China, or Rohingya in Myanmar had not. And as an ally of the oppressed, Wind felt that it was her job to say yes and to organize.

Now, as a reason for an individual to take a stance about a boycott, that argument seems ok to me. I am not sure I agree with it, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable standard for action: everyone picks their own battles, and a stance of “you must condemn everything or condemn nothing at all, ever” taken by some pro-Israel types is not really a tenable one. However, at the same time, I think it’s harder to ask an institution (of any sort, not just universities) to use allyship as a basis for action. They need rules which are more concrete and justifiable. Going after just one country – just Israel – feels at the very least capricious, if not necessarily antisemitic.

So, here’s where I want to divert a bit to get back to the issue of Israel’s actions since late 2023 because I think they change the context for the “what about actions of other regimes” argument. October 7, 2023, was of course a terrible atrocity and there were few who thought that Israel did not have some kind of right of response. Equally, however, few would suggest that a response which involved killing twice as many as lost their lives on that day every month for the next 30 months is a proportional one. The actions of the Government of Israel since the events of October 7, 2023 – which was, let us all agree, a terrible atrocity – have been inexcusable. You may not be OK with use of the term “genocide” for what has happened in Gaza and more recently South Lebanon (and the term genocide often seems too elastic to be useful), but when a former Likud prime minister feels comfortable describing Israel’s actions as war crimes, it suggests that there is a degree of inhumanity involved in Israeli policy that can’t dismissed as the ravings of antisemites. 

Back to McGill and the issue of how to create boycott policy. What if the LSA had used language such as “this institution should boycott universities in any countries whose current regimes are in front of the International Court of Justice for War crimes or crimes against humanity” (at present, I believe that would yield a list of Israel, Russia, Myanmar, and Iran, which doesn’t sound so bad to me). Would a referendum like this still have passed: or might it perhaps have passed with a bigger margin? Would it still be considered antisemitic?

My guess is no. Obviously, there are some that will simply always hold that criticism of Israel = antisemitism, but that’s, as I have been arguing, an untenable syllogism that should be beneath any serious academic or group of academics. But a firm set of principles, which take concerns about double-standards seriously, would have a similar effect on institutional posture towards Israel while avoiding the trap of appearing hypocritical. Perhaps all parties in Canadian universities could think about the value of such an approach rather than getting involved in unnecessary and unseemly slanging matches about “antisemitism”.

Here’s hoping, anyway.